Bells of the North Homestead

Six more weeks till Winter. Or so the story goes told by Alaskan Natives and sourdoughs alike.   When the fireweed has bloomed all the way to the top, we have six more weeks till the snow flies.   So far this break up and then into summer, we’ve had some successes….and some failures.    That’s pretty typical though.   The garden is doing well but could be doing better thanks to the late start because of our vacation in the lower 48.   That is a killer here since our growing season is so short.    We got to harvest a large bunch of garlic scapes earlier this week.   Yes indeed, garlic scapes.   SUCCESS! The garlic survived the winter! We’ll have garlic later this summer to harvest.   We’re about 2 days away from harvesting our first zucchini and summer squash of the season.   Our kale and broccoli rabe this year barely sprouted due to the fact that we got a late start on it.   We should have ...

Never before have I been responsible for caring for a outdoor water garden.  I mean, really, in Military housing, such a thing would be considered to be an extreme luxury so when we moved into our new home and I found myself the owner of a lovely, 1500 gallon pond, complete with a water fall, I found myself a little overwhelmed.  What do I do with such a thing? At one point we thought about raising trout in the pond, but we felt already so overwhelmed by the garden and the amount of work we now had that we threw our hands up and said "get to it later". Turns out immediately after break up, we discovered we had some work that was very much required.  We knew from the years we have been keeping indoor fish that agitating the water is always good.  It's always good to ensure your water isn't stagnate, so we plugged in our lovely waterfall and found our pond stunk.  Badly stunk.  It stunk enough that we all even hesitated to walk near it. So one weekend, mid...